Brian M Downing
I voted in the 1964 presidential elections. I wasn’t old enough, but I went into a voting booth and pulled a lever. I wasn’t in Cook County, but I nonetheless took part in the election. Pulling the lever that November evening and watching events unfold over the next several years shaped my political outlooks. Ahhh, I remember it as if it was only fifty-two years ago.
My mother and I walked a couple of blocks from the house to Pine Crest Elementary School, which ably served as a local precinct in a state as blue as a clear spring sky, though the nation was not so divided back then. Republicans and Democrats still thought of each other as decent Americans, but some were a little more thoughtful than others, that’s all. As mom and I entered the voting booth and closed the curtain, there before us stood rows of gleaming levers next to the names of various candidates. The sight was an inspiring one, conjuring images of the sanctity of the democratic process and a succession of august leaders. (As already noted, this wasn’t in Cook County.) In awe of the machinery and of the sacred process it tallied, I insisted on pulling the levers – well, really just the lever.
“No!”
“But I want to!”
“Absolutely not!”
“Then I’ll. . . .”
I don’t recall what combination of entreaty, cajolery, and brattiness I unleashed, but suffice it to say I was pretty good at all three and I won the right to vote that day, though in a manner that neither Jefferson nor Madison had outlined in their works.
The school board had no attraction for me; none of my teachers’ names was up there. County council? Who knew what it did. But up on the top row, barely within reach, were the levers for Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater, the two men vying that year for President of the United States – leader of the free world. Despite my youth, I still knew a bit about the presidential race. Lyndon Johnson had ascended to the presidency a year earlier, after John Kennedy’s assassination. Johnson would continue the Kennedy agenda of bringing social justice at home and spreading democracy around the world. He would end poverty and halt the advance of communism.
“Whatever you do, DON’T PULL THIS LEVER!” my mother warned in the same manner she might have pointed to a bottle of iodine and said, “Whatever you do, DON’T DRINK THIS STUFF!” Even I knew then that Goldwater was insensitive to the plight of the poor and so rash as to get us into a war in Vietnam – a remote country that I had first heard of on a Twilight Zone episode a year earlier and that I would visit on Defense Department business a few years later. My parents opposed involvement in Vietnam, even in 1964, and Johnson was the “peace candidate.” I swear.
So I adroitly pulled the Johnson lever and let mom handle the rest. Then we shifted an immense lever the size of a locomotive throttle, which registered my . . . well, our votes, and we exited the booth. Mom and I left Pine Crest Elementary School with a sense of pride in having contributed to ending injustice at home and avoiding recklessness in Southeast Asia. Lyndon Johnson won big that year, and everything seemed right.
Copyright 2016 Brian M Downing